Developing the new personal and social skills for the digitally connected workplace
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I was recently asked this question: Where does “managed learning” stop and “self-managed” learning begin?
So I created a chart ,which I am sharing below, to visualise my thoughts. I am sure there are a few other boxes that could be included – or be re-labelled (so I’m updating this chart regularly – now on version 6), but this puts my recent posts into context. I suppose I should also mention this is not a sequential process; this chart simply displays “activities” as either managed or self-managed.
 This is a post in a series that I am writing about how the future role of L&D is moving from “packaging learning” to “scaffolding learning”.
In the first post I explained that “packaging learning” involves organizing and wrapping up everything an individual needs to learn in a neat parcel, delivering it to them on a plate, and making sure they do it, whilst “scaffolding” is about supporting learning in many other less top-down organized ways.
In my last post I talked about a move from “packaging instruction” to “scaffolding instruction”. But what these both have in common is that they are still a “managed learning” process .
In this and my next post I am going to look at self-managed learning in an organization, and how that might be supported and scaffolded. Today I’m going to look at “supporting self-managed team learning”, and next time I will consider ”supporting self-managed personal and professional learning”.
Team learning is essential in any organization, for as my colleague, Harold Jarche points out, quoting Peter Senge.
“It is team learning, not individual learning, that adds to organizational learning.”
 But let’s be clear from the outset, supporting self-managed team learning is neither about packaging nor scaffolding instruction, rather it is about helping teams to organize and manage their own initiatives.
So supporting self-managed team (or social) learning is not about providing them with courses as they do their work, helping them to find their own courses, or even helping them to create their own courses for one another – rather it is about helping them to share their knowledge, experiences, ideas and resources as part of their daily workflow. It is, as my colleague Charles Jennings, puts it about helping them to extract learning from work, not trying to add or inject learning into work.
Supporting self-managed team learning is also about working in partnership with teams – either to address and support specific performance problems or to build or enhance existing sharing practices. So it will not involve designing a programme of instruction for a team, but rather will comprise a quite different set of “scaffolding” activities undertaken in conjunction with the team, which include:
- Understanding the sharing practices that are currently taking place - or not.
- Considering how these could be enhanced or built upon, or developed.
- Considering whether any technology could underpin knowledge sharing, and if so identifying appropriate technologies, preferably employing existing collaboration technologies or enterprise social networking that are being used to underpin the work (so a separate LMS is not the appropriate technology)
- Helping to provide the right conditions for ”team learning”, e,g. by helping to develop a culture of sharing and the value of sharing,
- Helping the individuals in the team to share – e.g. to create resources/job aids, curate links to share, share experiences or thoughts, and narrate their work – not by training them to be social, by showing them what it is to be social!
- Helping the individuals to manage their own knowledge – through a continuous process of seek-sense-share
- Helping to ensure knowledge sharing is part of the daily workflow – so it is not seen as an extra initiative – but an integral part of daily work.
- Helping to identify appropriate performance metrics to measure success - not by using traditional learning metrics or even social activity metrics – but in terms of actual job, team or business results.
There are an increasing number of examples of how L&D are supporting self-managed learning using new social technologies. An early one was the BT Dare2Share project, where L&D helped engineers to develop their own resources and share them with one another. Another example is Q&A’s internal Sales365 collaboration platform, which has recently won two Gold awards, and which was a collaborative initiative by both the L&D department and the Sales Team.
But successful initiatives in supporting self-managed team learning are not just about implementing new social technologies; they also involve developing a range of new social workplace worker skills.
Workers will need a new range of skills to be effective in a digitally connected workplace, e.g.
- Personal Knowledge Management skills – how to build develop a network of people and sources of information to draw from on a daily basis and how to make sense of the information, and share it appropriately
- Social collaboration skills – how to work and learn collaboratively and productively in a team
- Community manager skills – how to build and maintain a successful community of practice
- Connected Leader skills – how to lead a team in today’s networked, complex workplace
If you want to find out more about all these new skills, you can do so at the Connected Worker site
And learning professionals who wish to get involved in supporting self-managed learning in the workplace, will also need these new connected worker skills so that they can help others. As I said earlier, it’s not about telling others to be social, but helping hem to be social!. So for this reason we’ll shortly be releasing details of a new initiative which will help to build (and also certify) these key, new L&D skills.
 In my recent posts, The changing role of L&D: from “packaging” to “scaffolding” plus “social capability building” and Towards the Connected L&D Department I wrote about the need to move from a focus on “packaging” training to “scaffolding” learning, and I said I would talk more about what “scaffolding” looks like. For me, this is the key way for workplace learning professionals to move the learning industry into the future. In this post I’m going to look at “instructional scaffolding” but in subsequent posts, I will consider “scaffolding performance support & team collaboration” in the workplace as well as “scaffolding professional learning“.
 The concept of instuctional design is well known. It usually refers to the process of extracting knowledge from Subject Matter Experts, and presenting this content in a logical order for individuals to study. It also involves putting together formative quizzes and summative assessments to test understanding, and presenting this all in the form of courses, workshops, programmes etc. In many cases it is about “packaging” everything up and delivering this “instructional parcel” to individuals.
But it usually also involves “spoonfeeding” learners, as they often have a fairly passive role in the learning process with limited – and frequently tightly controlled – interaction. And although there is no teacher present, it is essentially a “sage on the stage”, information-dumping activity.
Learning in this way might suit some – i.e. those who expect to be trained how to do their jobs, but I’ve read how others get very angry at this approach, about the lack of autonomy it offers, and how it treats them like idiots. I’ve also overheard conversations in shops in the UK, as employees reluctantly set off to “do their e-learning” and how colleagues advise the frustrated trainees how to deal with the situation – “Take a book in, and just keep pressing the return key”. I’ve also heard how some people are paying their children to take their compliance training for them, since it forces them to sit in front of the screen for a lengthy period of time to ensure they are deemed “compliant”. Something is clearly not working!
 The concept of instructional scaffolding is however less well known, but essentially it is about providing the framework or infrastructure for learning to take place. So for me it is more about setting up an environment where a “guide on the side” can help individuals become more self-directed and find out things for themselves . When I set up the Social Learning Centre last year, I wanted to offer workshops that encouraged discussions and conversations around topics (see About our workshops):
“Our workshops are designed to give just enough structure, without constraining personal and social learning.”
Wikipedia has a page about instructional scaffolding, too – yes, the term already exists – which includes this paragraph.
“Effective learning environments use instructional scaffolding to aid the student in his/her construction of new knowledge. Avoid telling the learner exactly how to accomplish the task; do not solve the problem for the learner. This may help the learner immediately, but it hinders the learning process. It is important to promote better learning by helping the learner achieve his/her learning goal through the use of instructional scaffolding. The use of scaffolding helps the learner to actively build and construct new knowledge.”
A good example of the difference between instructional packaging and instructional scaffolding was provided recently by Debbie Morrison in her post A tale of two of MOOCs: divided by pedagogy. In a very useful table (reproduced below) she compares the approaches taken by the (very popular, connectivist) e-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC with the (aborted, instructivist) Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC. (The first is a great example of instructional scaffolding.)
Many people are enthused by the concept of MOOCs, and my colleague Jay Cross recently held a Google Hangout where he looked at how they might work in business. Whereas many people focus on the “massive” – large scale – aspect of MOOCs, the key thing for me, is the “scaffolding” approach used in connectivist-MOOCs (or c-MOOCs) .
So why aren’t we seeing more examples of instructional scaffolding in the workplace? Well it’s probably due to the same old reasons! The limited time available for training – which means it’s easier to provide an “package of instruction”, or a perceived need to ensure the quality and veracity of the content (so that no user-generated content is encouraged). But at its heart it’s probably about the need for control.
As we have seen above, there are significant disadvantages with the one-size-fits-all “packaged” approach to instruction, so for organisations that want to encourage flexible, adaptive, 21st century workers, using an instructional scaffolding approach provides an excellent way to start helping individuals take responsibility for their own learning and development.
Next post: Supporting self-managed team learning in the organisation
 Although I tweet links to interesting resources as I find them, and collate them in my 2013 Reading List, the important thing for me about curation is also taking some time to analyse what I’ve found to try and make sense of it all, and consider how it adds to my own thinking and practice.
So that’s why at the end of each month I take a look at all the resources I have collected during the month, and pick out the ones that I found particularly useful, valuable or impactful. So here is my selection from February 2013.
Working from home
One of the hot topics on the Web over the last week or so has been Marissa Meyer’s decision to terminate working at home for Yahoo employees. I was first alerted to this by Dan Pontefract’s post: Going Forward to the Past: Management Yahooliganism & No Longer Working From Home, where he wrote:
“My jaw dropped when I read it. Thanks to an internal memo leaked to Kara Swisher by a Yahoo employee, we have insight into a recent decision by their C-Suite. Taking a page from “we liked it better when we physically saw you hammering keystrokes on your laptop” the struggling company (bada Bing?) has mandated any Yahoo employee currently working from home (full-time or on occasion) must relocate their fingers and keystrokes back to the office by June. That’s right … if a Yahoo employee was able to work from home, it’s no longer in the employee contract. I call it ‘management yahooliganism‘.”
Since that time there have been many blog posts about this topic. Here are a couple of snippets from two others I found useful reading:
“Edicts like the one from the Head of Yahoo! HR encourage presenteeism. There in body, absent in mind. Human beings are complex and if a simple trick like bring everyone into the same building was a guarantee of success, guess what? Noone would be allowed to work anywhere else. Flexibility was introduced to solve problems and leverage communications technologies; it did not happen for the sake of it.”
“The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you’re doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you’re staffing your teams incorrectly. If you’re looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It’s 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.”
Self-organized learning
Sugata Mitra, famous for the “hole-in-the-wall” computers he put in to the slums of India and for showing how children can teach themselves, won the $1 million dollar TED prize a few days, and promised to use the money to “build a school in the cloud”. This post at the TED site talks about his SOLE (Self-Organised Learning Environment) Challenge, (27 February 2013)
“Sugata is inviting parents and teachers everywhere to set-up a Self-Organized Learning Environment by downloading the SOLE toolkit and creating their own SOLE environments.”
Take a look at the SOLE Toolkit, which offers a framework and suggestions for supporting self-organised learning in school-age children. This is an approach that I actually believe needs to be supported more widely.
More about supporting learning
I read a number of other posts about how people are supporting learning more widely in their organisations this month. Here are a couple:
Helen Blunden’s post and presentation showed How to promote Twitter for professional development to your colleagues (27 February 2013)
“I reflected on how I used Twitter and created a presentation that was a mix of activities, theory, tweeting and personal stories …
“Are you sure you want to do this? Your colleagues will know your every move!” some people outside the organisation questioned me.
Although this may be considered a downside to some, I’m not one for keeping information to myself (I’d make a hopeless spy) and actively share what I know and what I learn to anyone who cares to listen. Besides, I’m in Learning and Development – I’m meant to coach, teach, support and guide others. Why would I want to do otherwise?
John Stepper wrote about another type of support initiative in his organisation, A genius bar in every building (9 February 2013)
“A Genius Bar in every building” started as a blog post on our social collaboration platform. It described how local volunteers could staff pop-up Genius Bars and help people set up their iPhones and iPads. Over the next few days, others contributed ideas and offered to volunteer. Soon, we had organized our first 2 events.
Connected learning
Sharing and learning with and from one other, is nothing new; and doesn’t require an instructor, teacher or trainer to be involved. In fact, in an organisational content the key thing to realise is that it’s not just about “adding social” into instructional forms of learning, but about supporting learning as it happens naturally in the flow of daily work, as Charles Jennings makes clear in Re-thinking workplace learning: extracting rather than adding (14 February 2013)
“Extracting learning from work employs very different approaches to the additive form of workplace learning. Firstly the focus is not on learning but on performance improvement from the outset. It’s also not about requiring workers to adjust their working time and flow to include specific activities that have the explicit purpose of assisting learning. It’s simply about developing approaches that help workers to learn more from their day-to-day work.”
Supporting this type of social or “connected” learning is going to be key aspect of organisational learning in the future (as I’ve written about in previous blog posts myself here). Harold Jarche points out the importance of this approach in his blog posts too. Here are snippets from two of them.
“As more organizations engage with connected workers who have seen the new workplace structures, they will need to change some habits, like letting workers choose their own tools. Knowledge artisans are often more contractual, more independent and shorter-term than previous information age employees. Because of their more nomadic nature, artisanal workers will bring their own learning networks. Companies will need to accept this in order to get work done. Also, training departments must be ready to adapt to knowledge artisans by allowing them to collaborate and connect with their external online networks. When the future of learning is the future of work, then learning support has to adapt to the new reality of an artisanal workforce. But it’s also worth noting that to be a successful knowledge artisan will take a lot more than just being a good employee.
“Why is self-directed learning and professional development so important today? Rawn Shah, commenting on one of my presentations, said that knowledge is evolving faster than can be codified in formal systems and is depreciating in value over time. This pretty well sums up the situation.”
Knowledgeable, connected workers are clearly opening up a new era of work, as John Kotter explains in It’s the end of an era – enter the knowledgeable networker (13 February 2013)
“So, we now have a new era emerging: The era of the knowledgeable networker. Knowledgeable networkers are very good at what they do, and at the same time, do not pretend to know it all. They consider the entire puzzle, not just their own area of expertise. They’re integrative thinkers with broad interests and connections. They see how puzzle pieces fit together without needing to know everything about each piece – instead, they KNOW A LOT OF PEOPLE and HAVE A LOT OF INFORMATION SOURCES. They have instant access to multiple knowledge workers via a phone call, email, Twitter post, or LinkedIn InMail. They can bring experts and expertise into a team, a department, or organization to fulfill a specific need or help seize an opportunity.”
So, are you helping to encourage as well as build the new Connected Worker skills in your organisation?
In my previous post I shared a chart I have been using to demonstrate what it means for the L&D function to move from a “packaging” role to one that helps to support and “scaffold” learning in the flow of daily work. I have had a few questions asking how other organisations are moving forward in these areas, so in this (revised) chart below I have colour-coded the areas to show the different type of activity I am seeing.
Firstly, the red area is the traditional L&D operating area – designing, delivering and managing instruction (ie face-to-face training and e-learning)
The orange area is where I am now seeing quite a lot of interest and activity; that is expanding the traditional L&D area into “packaging” performance support, and also moving into more “scaffolded” and social approaches to formal learning, and also examples of self-service professional learning portals for on-demand access to a range of opportunities.
The blue area is the new area of “social collaboration”, where a number of forward-thinking L&D departments are already playing a major role. Here they are working in partnership with teams and groups to help them share knowledge, experience and resources as a natural part and process of their daily work. Some are also helping to build the new personal and social skills to help their people become effective Connected Workers.
I am often asked why L&D departments should become involved in this new blue area. There are many good reasons for this. There’s the fact that working is changing, and that organizational learning needs to change too. But this blue area is where the “real” learning takes place in the workplace – in the workflow informally and socially. Up to recently, L&D hasn’t been able to support this type of learning in any easy way, but now there are huge opportunities to make a significant impact on the business, and in doing so measure the success of initiatives and efforts in meaningful terms like performance improvements and behavioural changes.
And what is the cost of not getting involved? Well, this blue area is ripe for the picking, so if L&D doesn’t get involved, others will do so – whether it be IT, Business Ops, or something else. But what’s more as face-to-face training goes out of fashion, and e-learning is outsourced – as is happening to Training Depts on a regular basis now – then it avoids the risk of the L&D team being shut down. A Connected L&D Dept will have a significantly enhanced role in the organisation and will become an indispensable function.
So how do you get started? Well, this blue area of work requires a very different mindset and approach from the traditional L&D role. It also requires a set of new capabilities and skills. And it involves using and supporting a range of new social technologies rather than dedicated “learning technologies”.
Harold Jarche and I have been advising organisations as well as leading open sessions on this for a number of years now, and we are about to offer a range of new and updated activities and workshops, which we will announce here shortly. But in the meantime, if you want to find out more about what it involves , take a look at our Connected Worker site and in particular our Connected L&D Department initiative.
Other posts in this series
1 - The changing role of L&D: from “packaging” to “scaffolding” plus “social capability building”
3 - Instructional design: from “packaging” to “scaffolding”
4 - Supporting self-managed team learning in the organisation
I have been been talking to a number of different organisations recently about the future of the L&D department and in doing so have been building on the diagram I shared in a recent post - where I illustrated how the function of the department is expanding into the new areas of performance support, as well as supporting social collaboration and personal learning.
I think there are a number of additional factors involved which are not that clear in that diagram – and that is how the future is about moving on from a focus on organizing others’ learning by “packaging” up lots of content, delivering it to them “on a plate”, and then managing access to it all.
 Rather the future is going to be more about “scaffolding“. I mean by this, working in partnership with the relevant team or group in the organization to help to provide a framework – ie the infrastructure (platforms, tools etc) as well as the right conditions for learning and performance support and improvement to take place.
And furthermore, rather than trying to design, create, deliver or even “control” what happens there, there is also a need for a focus on “building the new personal and social capabilities” that are are going to be required by the new “connected workers”, in order for them to work and learn effectively in the digitally connected workplace
So I’d like to share with you another diagram I have been working on, to show what all this means in practice. Behind each of the coloured areas there is obviously much more detail, illustrated by case studies and examples – which I’ll talk more about in subsequent posts. But in the meantime if you are interested in the area of social capability building, take a look at the Connected Worker site.
Follow-up posts
2 - Towards the Connected L&D Department
3 - Instructional design: from “packaging” to “scaffolding”
4 - Supporting self-managed team learning in the organisation
 This workshop runs 1-31 March 2013 at the Social Learning Centre, and is led by Harold Jarche
The workshop will look at ways to enhance social learning, or people learning together while working.
The Agenda will include an optional introductory webinar and cover four key areas:
- Social learning: The lubricant for social business
- Narrating your work and learning
- Communities of Practice as bridges between work and learning
- Value Network Analysis in a nutshell
Find out more about this workshop and how to sign up here.
Note: This is the last time this workshop will run in our current series of workshops at the Social Learning Centre.
 Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin.
On this website you can find all sorts of information about Charles Darwin and the International Darwin Day Fundation
 My previous post about Instructional Design in 140 characters generated a lot of interest, so I thought I’d tell you about a project I set up in 2010 to explore the use of Twitter to provide daily “tiny facts”.
I created the Twitter account, @140university and in the first part of the project I provided daily tweets (in a number of different categories) which contained a fact PLUS a link to a resource to find out more. This allowed me to provide extended training/teaching content. Here are couple of tweets from 140 University:
I then introduced a quiz day on the Saturday of each week and explained in a tweet how it would work:
On Saturdays I then tweeted a question, for example.
On the Sunday I then tweeted the answer:
and also announced the winner
After @140University’s summer vacation in 2010, I decided to use the quiz format every day, to encourage enquiry-based learning. For example:
and then
and of course the winner
As for the practicalities of achieving all this, note that I scheduled the daily tweets for the week in advance (using Hootsuite at that time) although I did have to create the “winning tweet” every day
Note: I also set up a 140 University Facebook page which provided another channel for this project. Although I haven’t done any more on this project since the end of 2010, both the Twitter account and Facebook page are still active.
tinyTraining
I have written about this project and other educational/training uses of Twitter in different places, but with the new interest in this area, I have decided to collate all these resources for easy reference on my tinyTraining page, where you can find other “tiny training” activities, and also some guidance on how you might put all the elements together to create a more structured “tiny course”.
Last night I attended the Learning Awards 2013 hosted by the Learning & Performance Institute at the Dorchester Hotel. I was one of the many judges for the awards, so I was delighted to be invited to see the awards being presented to the worthy winners.
And when it came to the final award, the Colin Corder Award for outstanding contribution to the learning industry, I was intrigued to hear who had won this year. The first indication was that it was a woman – but I was absolutely stunned to hear my own name mentioned and my own photo flash on the screen. In fact, as Don Taylor, the Chair of LPI, talked further, I went through pretty much every emotion possible!
Eventually I got to the stage, and received the award, which was sponsored by Cisco. This was particularly poignant for me, since my time working for Cisco in 2000-2001 helped to shape my own thinking about workplace learning. Cisco was – and undoubtedly still is – an incredible company to work for.
Here’s a photo that Lesley Price took of me that also includes Susanna Reid, the BBC Breakfast presenter, the host for the Awards evening.
As those who were at the event will know, I was totally overwhelmed by the whole experience, so I wasn’t even able to manage a few words of thanks. But I want to put that right now.
Firstly, I want to thank the Learning & Performance Institute – and all those who nominated me – for the incredible honour bestowed on me. I really can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me.
I also want to thank the very many people – too many to name here - who have inspired and encouraged me over the years – but particular thanks go to my very close colleagues and friends- Jay, Harold, Charles and Clark.
AND of course I want to thank ALL of you for reading my blog posts or connecting with me on Twitter or Facebook or wherever – and for all the support you have given me.
But now I would like to ask you something …
The LPI supports the UK charity Dreamflight, which takes seriously ill and disabled children on the holiday of a lifetime to Orlando, Florida. For these children, however, this is MUCH MUCH more than a holiday; it changes their lives. The children leave their families behind which this gives them an opportunity to discover independence, confidence, and a whole new outlook on life. Dreamflight children have in fact gone on to amazing achievements, and at the LPI Awards ceremony last night, a patron of the charity, the paralympic gold medallist, Liz Johnson, told us how Dreamflight had shaped her whole attitude to life. The room was spellbound by her moving and inspiring story.
So what I would like to ask YOU is … if you have in any way been inspired or helped by me over the years, that you might show your thanks by making a donation - however small to this very worthy charity. That way we can help to change even more lives.
THANK YOU!
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